Western Digital hasn't cut any corners with the Black² and this includes the packaging. The drive comes packed in an attractive, black and gold box constructed out of heavy duty cardboard. The inner portion slides out, giving you access to the box's contents. Along with the drive, you get an SATA-to-USB 3.0 adaptor, USB key, quick install guide and warranty information.
The USB key doesn't actually contain any software. Instead, when you insert it into your computer, it takes you to the Black² product page on WD's website. From here, you can view installation videos and download the latest versions of the partition and data transfer software.
Physical Features:
As you'd expect, the WD Black² has a very unique construction. To keep it as thin as possible, the drive is not enclosed in a metal or plastic casing. In fact, the top of the drive is actually the PCB for the SSD. If you look closely, you can see the traces on the circuit board showing through the black finish.
From the bottom, the Black² looks a lot like a traditional hard drive. Along with a single set of SATA and power connectors, there is an enclosure housing a pair of 500GB platters. The PCB also looks very similar to the ones on WD's Blue Slim drives. However, there is one addition: a Marvell 88SM9642 SATA bridge chip, which lets the single SATA port communicate with both the SSD and HDD portions of the drive.
The two halves of the drive are held together using three screws and a generous amount of double sided tape. With them split apart, you can see that the hard drive portion is a modified version of WD's Blue Slim hard drive. The Blue Slim has a 7mm z-height, 16MB buffer and spins at 5,400 RPM.
The SSD portion of the Black² is powered by JMicron's JMF667H controller. The JMF667H is paired with two 64GB IMFT 60074157 20nm MLC NAND chips and a 128MB Nanya NT5CB64M16FP-DH DDR3-1600 SDRAM chip that is used for caching.
